Due Babele
Galleria Giovanni Bonelli is pleased to present, at its Milan venue, DUE BABELE, a solo exhibition by artist Fulvio Di Piazza.
The pictorial universe of Fulvio Di Piazza unfolds like a constellation of images that both captivate and unsettle the gaze, compelling the viewer to redefine their perceptual categories.
In this context, painting is neither a passive surface nor a narrative illustration, but rather an epistemic and metaphysical device—a laboratory in which the visible and the invisible intertwine, generating forms that are at once sensory concretions and conceptual allegories. The articulation of these figurative worlds is rooted in a complex genealogy that, rather than dispersing the pictorial language, constitutes its generative fabric: a weave manifested in the constant tension between order and chaos, monumentality and ruin, decorative exuberance and ironic decay.
What emerges is an imaginary in which the Baroque principle of horror vacui transforms into entropic proliferation, and painting becomes a tool for mapping excess, instability, and the perpetual metamorphosis of reality.
The two Towers of Babel that dominate the work represent the conceptual core around which this universe takes shape. While they evoke the biblical archetype of linguistic confusion and cultural fragmentation, in Di Piazza’s work they assume an additional significance: no longer merely symbols of human hybris and consequent downfall, but signs of a humanity lost in a present dominated by communicative disintegration and the absence of shared reference points. From this perspective, ruin is not presented as a residue of the past, but as an ontological condition of the present, and the painted landscape becomes an allegory of a world where crisis is the norm and stability a mirage. Surrounding these immense and unstable architectures is a proliferation of hybrid figures, suspended between fantastical zoology and surreal architecture. These beings testify to the dissolution of ontological boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic, the living and the constructed.
A metamorphic logic dominates the work—one that points to a philosophy of universal interconnection: nothing exists in isolation; every form is the result of a relationship, and every entity is already always contaminated by another. It is in this dimension that Di Piazza’s painting opens onto philosophical terrain, transcending aesthetics to enter the realm of ontology. The infinite universes of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza’s conception of Deus sive Natura, and Plato’s idea of the Anima Mundi constitute implicit references for understanding the depth of a practice that does not merely imagine fantastical worlds, but establishes them as allegories of an indivisible totality. At the same time, the connection with Arne Næss’s concept of deep ecology becomes evident: painting stages a paradigm in which the intrinsic value of every living form is recognized, and in which relationships prevail over individual entities. Nature, in its incessant regeneration, reveals itself not as a backdrop, but as a primary ontological principle—one that absorbs and reconfigures even the ruins of civilization.
In this sense, painting becomes a philosophical exercise. It does not merely represent, but produces an experience of connivance—to use a term dear to Spinoza—in which the viewer is called to share a way of being-in-the-world.
Irony, sarcasm, and drama coexist in a constant tension that does not resolve, but instead compels us to think of reality as a dynamic field of forces, relationships, and possibilities. Di Piazza’s Babel, therefore, does not merely denounce contemporary confusion, but opens up as a utopian device: a “possible world” that invites us to rethink our place in the universe—not as the center of an anthropocentric system, but as a fragile yet necessary part of an infinite cosmic network.
Within this horizon, painting reveals itself not only as an aesthetic act, but as a philosophical gesture—capable of translating into images the need for a new ecological and existential paradigm.